


The Space of a Heartbeat (The Memories it can Contain)

by chaWOOPa



Series: a family is not built in a day but sometimes they are lost in one [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fluff and Angst, Gay Character, Hey guys luce is kina fucked up, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, It isnt technically mentioned but its there. Taako is trans. He is, Lesbian Character, Other, So is lup lmao welcome to fantasy this is how identical twins can work now, Temporary Character Death, There are emotions but they are not all bad. <3, Trans Character, Trans Taako (The Adventure Zone)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 10:34:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13165128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaWOOPa/pseuds/chaWOOPa
Summary: There is white hair on dark skin and bright eyes longing forHer next great adventure or really her first becauseAll she has ever done is write through other people’s eyesWhen all she wants to do is write through her own.





	The Space of a Heartbeat (The Memories it can Contain)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Foxy-alien](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Foxy-alien).



> This was a secret Santa gift for my babe Adeline!!! It is late but I worked hard so... Enjoy!!!! <3

There is white hair on dark skin and bright eyes longing for

Her next great adventure or really her first because

All she has ever done is write through other people’s eyes

When all she wants to do is write through her own.

  1. A young woman leaves her dead home behind with a heavy heart, wide eyes, and the hope of one day making it back.
  2. Fresh off the destruction of a second world she grew too attached to she cannot let herself see this new one as more than dead.
  3. Her brother, her best friend, and her captain all managed to die in a single swoop, making the pilot training they all had last year that much more important.
  4. Magic works differently in this world and she buries herself in writing about it instead of thinking about the end of another world when they don’t get to the light in time.
  5. Time is weird on this plane; the people here measure it in heartbeats because that is the only thing that moves at a consistent pace.
  6. There is something cruel in the way she opens her heart to every world so far but this one, where she worked to save children from government-organized slaughter, will always be the worst.
  7. She and Taako need time to recuperate from last year, and they do it together among the untouched trees and fearless animals of the next world; theirs is a bond forged in fire and strengthen in peace.
  8. They found the link between surviving worlds and saving the light a while ago, but in this world it becomes clear how important it really is to the rest of the crew when Magnus dies to get it and Merle stays with his people.
  9. The twins were always the ones to cook dinner, throwing ingredients back and forth with practiced ease that only came when you knew someone better than you knew yourself; Lucretia was a poor substitute for Lup but by the end of the year she was almost as good a chef.
  10. Lucretia has a secondhand account of what happened on this plane, written in the chicken-scratch of Lup’s handwriting that starts with “Lucy was too thirsty for those mermaids to remember they were killers” and ends with “Taako misses you, Lucy.”
  11. Even though Lucretia is technically thirty she still looks nineteen and sometimes she doesn’t mind it; especially when it means she doesn’t have to be the one to marry an alien prince to get the light and save a plane from certain destruction.
  12. There isn’t water on the next plane, or at least, nothing drinkable for most of the crew. Merle and Davenport finish out her journal that year with twin doodles of the people who evolved to survive there that she never got a chance to meet.
  13. There is less writing this cycle, and more pictures; all sketches with long lines and hard edges, no real curves to them. It is both a relief and a shock when she reforms with both arms perfect at the beginning of the next year, but she never kicks the habit of drawing.
  14. It was Magnus’s turn to find a new habit in the next year when he lost a leg in the same moment they all lost Taako; at the end of the year he was almost as good a painter as Lucretia was.
  15. Lup and Taako went together this time, and it was hard to swallow every mouthful of homemade soup or bread or chili or anything that Lucretia struggled through the unfamiliar recipes for, but when the twins came back to their own personal cookbooks of recipes local to that plane she knew it had been worth it.
  16. Taako turns the cookbook into a spell book, writing notes in the margins and adding things to the back. He never leaves it anywhere for long and adds more than Lucretia knows to it. She wouldn’t have it any other way.
  17. There is a moment, a moment both deeply terrifying and terrifyingly eye opening, where Lucretia realizes that she would sacrifice as many planes as it takes to keep her family safe. She does not think about this as Taako cradles the small pulsing stone in his arms as the ship takes off. She does not think about this as they all reach in and promise not to go down that road again. She does not think about it.
  18. The next plane isn’t as advanced as the last one, but somehow they still manage to scrape together enough technology to make some long needed expansions to the ship. It is quiet on this plane and Lucretia sketches until her fingers bleed so that nothing she has seen will be forgotten.
  19. Lucretia tries not to interact much with then people of the next place they land on, but Magnus eventually pulls her out to meet them under the pretense of “You are going to suffocate in there, Luce, you need some sunlight!”
  20. What kills her in the end is leaving too many parts of her own heart behind.
  21. When she comes back they are just the six of them on the beach and it is easy to let her heart rest and recharge; It doesn’t stop the hurt, but the picture of the seven of them-of her family with her nestled safely in the middle-helps mediate it.
  22. The next world welcomes them like heroes and Taako-and-Lup split into Taako and Lup when one wants to hang back because something feels off and the other embraces the positivity; Lucretia flies the ship out that year with Taako at her side, glad to see the gilded cities go.
  23. Merle’s powers fluctuate with each planar system they end up on, and this isn’t the last time they will find themselves without a healer, but there is something about the way Merle retreats to his greenhouse of a room that makes this first time most memorable.
  24. In the peace of the next world (a people who are not welcoming but are not hostile, they are just, simply put, there; they are just surviving the same as everyone else) Lucretia realizes she has lived through more apocalypses than she did peaceful years.
  25. One of the twins announces that is about time they start celebrating _something_ good, so the instate the birthday rule; there is a week every year where they sit down and celebrate everyone’s birthdays, and if someone isn’t there one year they get another tier on their cake the next. Everyone has one tier this year.
  26. Magic is different in every plane they have been on; some are like their home plane with gods and spell slots and so on, but on others magic flows more freely or not at all. On this one, they find out that Magnus isn’t the only one with martial arts training and Lucretia has to step away from her writing to help teach her family to defend themselves without magic.
  27. The ‘rough boi training’ never really stops and Lucretia is glad for it. Throwing Lup to the ground in ten second flat helps soothe the grief of losing a family member that she will never get used to.
  28. There is something sinister that roams the nighttime on this plane and Barry was bitten by one before he could fight it off. After the first time Barry drank one of the crew’s blood to stay alive Lucretia decided she would rather not get involved with the semantics no matter how interesting they were.
  29. Thankfully the effects of the vampire didn’t follow them into the next cycle, but that didn’t mean Barry got to forget them. Most of the team would end up with a ‘break year’ (Barry was the only one to insist they call them suicide years) but Barry-sweet, strong, nerdy Barry-had lost his mother to that so his ‘break year’ was spent in his lab.
  30. Tesseralia was a magnificent sight to behold, but Lucretia would always associate it with watching Merle blow away like dust in the wind when his first attempt at parlay failed. The sting of losing people hadn’t faded 30 years in and part of her hoped it never would.
  31. The whole team pitched in to build a wheelchair for Barry this year when his legs were taken out of commission early on. Magnus and Davenport modified a dining chair, Lup made it float, Taako made it look better, and Lucretia helped Barry get used to using it.
  32. The chair was abandon next year when everyone came back perfectly fit, but the idea kept living when Magnus lost an arm and Taako half his hearing and sight in a magical explosion.
  33. For the fourth year in a row Merle is absent at the birthday celebration, so the twins resolve to stop him before his cake gets too ridiculously tall.
  34. The flora and fauna in this world is such that the custom is for 10 year-olds to go adventuring (sometimes they even capture Gods in round metal balls). Taako and Lup take offense to sending 10 year olds out alone and Magnus can’t bear the thought of leaving his new dog-like friends behind.
  35. This new world has very little edible food and Lucretia finally finds out the real reason the twins went into their respective schools of music when they fall back into the mindset they lived in for most of their life. Everyone is hunger, but no one starves that cycle.
  36. Magnus proposes next cycle that the twins get a break from cooking and they all find out that the only ones capable of eating food that isn’t perfectly prepared are the ones who prepare it.
  37. Lucretia can feel weariness settling in her bones as she watches Merle blow away with the wind again and they leave another plane to be devoured by the hunger.
  38. In total Lucretia will kill herself three times before the year with the judges. This is her second rest year. No one knows it is a rest year but her.
  39. There is a star system almost close enough for the Starblaster to make it within a year, but Taako assures them they have the supplies to feed everyone for a year and Davenport is worried about the ship. What Taako didn’t tell them was that he wouldn’t quite finish the year with the rest of them.
  40. Taako and Lup take charge of restocking the ship’s supplies after the year in space and Lucretia watches as Davenport teaches Magnus to tinker with the ship and Barry learns healing spells from Merle. Merle waits until the end of the year to parlay and by then everyone feels just a little better.
  41. Lucretia can’t stop waiting for the other shoe to drop when the next world is just as peaceful and easy as the last. It is almost a relief when Lup and Taako disappear during a supply run and Lucretia doesn’t have to wait for it anymore.
  42. Taako loses his hearing and his voice to the same curse that takes Lucretia’s sight. She can still hear Lup translate for Taako, but that doesn’t help in the early mornings when Taako makes lavender tea for two. Luckily, they both pick up language easily and Morse code is exactly that, a language.
  43. Taako and Lucretia don’t stop using their coded language to tap out messages to each other even after they get their senses back. No one figures out what any of it means besides the two of them.
  44. Lup dies without Taako for the first time in over 15 years and Taako doesn’t take it well. Barry goes shortly after she does and Taako doesn’t leave his room for two weeks. Finally, Lucretia hears a gentle knock on her door, followed by the coded words “Can I sleep here?” Taako doesn’t leave until Lup and Barry come back.
  45. Magnus confesses during ‘team bonding’ one night on the common room floor (Taako is curled up between him and Lup; Davenport and Merle are clinging to each other like their life depends on it and leaning back against Barry and Lup; Lucretia sits huddled in the middle of the sleeping pile with Magnus just behind her and the rest of her family all around her) that he can’t remember what his parents looked like.
  46. None of the crew likes to talk about this year, even though the only one to not survive to the end was Merle. Lucretia still wrote it all down.
  47. The legato Conservatory was Lucretia’s favorite year even after it was all over. If she could have chosen to stay somewhere, it would have been there, where the most violent form of conflict was shit talking.
  48. Lucretia was never sure where her life would take her, but with the landscapes of all 47 worlds she had been to before this hanging somewhere on the ship, she was glad it had brought her here.
  49. Magnus insisted that this was their 50th cycle but the rest of the crew fought him on it. It was their 50th world, as evidence by Taako’s 50 hats, but they had only lived the same year 49 times.
  50. Thankfully, their 50th year was somewhere peaceful and easy to survive. No one really wanted to celebrate the 50th anniversary of going on the run or losing their home, but it felt too significant to let it slip by. It felt _wrong_ to do nothing.
  51. Looking back was a specialty of Lucretia’s in the coming years, but nothing would haunt her as much as this cycle where a woman thrust her newborn child into her arms only for Lucretia to dissolve into white bond-strings, leaving their last hope of salvation alone on a dirty, empty street and Lucretia on the deck of a silver ship gripping helplessly at empty air.
  52. Lucretia sees a newborn and their dying mother every time she closes her eyes. Nothing could make her forget, not even Fisher. This is her last ‘rest year’.
  53. Lucretia realizes when they have birthdays the next year that this two-tiered cake of hers should say seventy-two. She is three times as old as she was when she left and for some reason that has her doubled over with laughter and has tears streaming down her still nineteen year old face. If she were aging like normal she would only have about eight years left. Her future is as endless and unknown as the ocean now.
  54. Barry can only heal so much before he turns to the necrotic energy he is so familiar with. Lucretia can’t look him in the eyes for a week after Taako dies this cycle and Barry lost control in a moment fueled by desperation and love. Merle is only allowed to call the hunger at the end of the year now.
  55. Lup joked about halfway through this hungry year that it was her turn to starve and Taako didn’t talk to her for a month except to make sure she was eating. Lucretia didn’t realize that Lup had been serious until she didn’t come back to the ship two months from the end of the cycle.
  56. There are no humans on the planet they land on this year-not that it lacks sentient life, just none of it matches up biologically with the humans on the Starblaster. Lucretia isn’t allowed to go planet-side after Magnus proves the hard way that humans just aren’t meant to survive here anymore.
  57. Taako is still soft to loss. He has been since the start of the trip and every life lost to the hunger rest on his shoulders like a boulder and Lucretia wonders how he carries them all with such grace. He never tells her, but sometimes he lets those boulders rest on the floor of her room while he cries into her shoulders and she pretends to not notice his tears. It helps them both.
  58. Cap’enport makes friends with the locals of this plane, this year. He is the only one that trusts them but not the only one that pays for it when they come to burn the witches on board. Merle, Lucretia, Fisher, and Davenport all make it out in time to flee the hunger.
  59. Taako teaches Lucretia some more about cooking while he and Lup slowly fade into nothingness. The local population calls it a curse sent from an angry god after the elves of this realm got too close to ascending themselves. All anyone can do is watch it happen.
  60. The crew is stuck with mostly physical attacks again and Taako proves to be the least helpful of them all in fights. This time, it is Lucretia who tries to teach him to fight and by the end of the year he can land a decent punch at least.
  61. This is another space year but this time their food won’t stretch for seven no matter what Taako does. In the end, Magnus takes a break year and Merle goes to meet with John early. No one sleeps alone that year.
  62. Lucretia finds Taako lounging on her bed early in this year with nail polish, makeup, and clothes spread out around him like a hurricane. He says, _Taako needs a break and Lup-de-Lup is out with Bluejeans, so it’s time for the gays to party_ and Lucretia doesn’t protest. She is eighty-one, looks nineteen, is dressed to kill, and is getting sloshed on the deck of a silver ship she calls home with a man she calls brother. In that moment, she is truly happy.
  63. Magnus carries her around most of this cycle after she breaks her ankle hiking up a mountain to get the light. She told him she could use the chair from a dozen or so years ago that they still regularly use to race down hallways of the ship, but he tells her he likes this better.
  64. Lucretia won three hundred gold off of Taako alone when it only took forty-seven years for Barry and Lup to get together, but now she had racked up almost eight thousand total because it only took them seventeen to get married.
  65. Lucretia never wants to be alone again.
  66. This is a new Lucretia. She knows what it is to be alone and she won’t sleep in her room alone anymore. She doesn’t take a break year this year, not when she could be last again.
  67. There is less danger this cycle so when Cap’enport sets to fixing the ship up Lucretia makes him teach her how to help. She shows him all the places she jerry-rigged the ship to work and he stops calling her Little Lucy, swapping it for Luce. This doesn’t hurt like she thinks it should.
  68. Taako and Lucretia have more in common now than they ever did before. Lucretia can’t sleep alone without fighting off night terrors of battles her physical body never saw and Taako-Taako can’t sleep at all without the warmth and steady heartbeat of another being next to him. He never tells her why and she doesn’t ever ask.
  69. Merle is the one to suggest that they take a breather this year when the light falls nearly on top of them on this deserted plane. He can’t find a god to pray to, and the wizards in the party are at half spell slots without casting a thing so everyone agrees. She doesn’t know it yet but this is the last good year for another thirteen of them.
  70. “ _Things escalated too fast during negotiations, half the crew was left behind while Cap’enport, Magnus, Merle, and Taako took the ship somewhere safe. Lup and I both were injured in the fight, but Barry got her stable and I… Don’t worry about me. When you find Lup and Barry, tell them I love them, and that I am sorry I wasn’t there when you came back. There are people in this world that need my help more than you guys do right now._ ”
  71. Lucretia had a _wild_ story when she reformed on the ship the next year and she told it in the coded _tap tap tap_ of her and Taako’s language over 2am tea. She had seen something in the eyes of the people there that reminded her of home and she would not see those people go without a fight. Not again.
  72. Lucretia hasn’t seen Taako sleep a full night in too many years to count ( _a little over 71_ ) but Magnus usually slept like a rock. In this dusty, barren, desert of world, however, she finds the two of them joining her for lavender tea at 2am. Magnus says it is the heat but after Barry makes dust masks for everyone so they can go outside, Magnus refuses to go without it and Lucretia wonders-not for the first time-how much of his life she has missed.
  73. The next plane-hop drops them in the middle of a war for what the people here are calling middle-earth. They do not find the light of creation, but they find a record of two similar conflicts from the past in the hands of a young Halfling woman who tells them her great-grandfather was in love with the man who wrote the second story. Lucretia cannot read the language it is in, but she treasures the book anyway.
  74. There is something wrong with this universe. Time and space mean nothing here and when the light falls it is redirected to another place at another time by a gateway Barry cannot figure out. Lucretia weeps for the first time in years as these teenagers grasp the handle of a house shaped door and just barely escape to a new universe. “ _This proves that there is hope left yet_ ” she writes in her journal next to a drawing of the small group of teens.
  75. Taako calls this world “Tall, dark, and Hungry” to lighten the mood when the light lands on an entirely different planet than they did. It doesn’t quite work.
  76. Merle can’t reach his god on this plane. He isn’t the only one, he is just feeling it the hardest. This time he takes to gardening in Lucretia’s room so that she will have someone to talk to besides Fisher while confined to bed rest for an injury he could have healed in an instant. He can’t heal her physically, but the company and the flowers do wonders for her mental health.
  77. Lucretia keeps the plants in her room (though she refuses to talk to them in the same way merle did). It turns out to be a good choice when the air on the newest plane is toxic to humans unless filtered through the plants first. Her room becomes fort human-and-Fisher that cycle.
  78. Lucretia leads the charge to get the light the next cycle when no one else will go into the forest of mushrooms to get it. They aren’t poison this time, but Magnus looks on the edge of panic every time he looks at them and the rest of the crew doesn’t fare much better. Lucretia makes it to the light and back in record time but she goes down defending it shortly after getting back. They weren’t the only ones looking for it, after all.
  79. It is Lucretia’s turn to showcase her PTSD this cycle when they are tossed into yet another civil war. This time, she stays with the ship and finds things to do to keep her mind off of a dying mother and an abandon infant daughter.
  80. Neither Taako nor Lucretia want to stick around this cycle, but they make a pact instead of taking the easy way. _You won’t be last ever again,_ Taako tells her as they lay side by side on her bed, sunlight filtering through the leaves of the flowers climbing over her window. She can’t remember which plane they are native too. _You won’t be last, and I won’t cook alone. Deal?_ Lucretia can’t remember when she started crying, but she doesn’t stop herself. _Deal._
  81. They keep their word this year. Lup goes out like a candle in the wind with six months left and instead of flinging himself after her, Taako finds Lucretia in the kitchen every time he goes there. Barry and Taako help her fly the ship out that year as the hunger and various inhabitants of the plane pursue them and Luce is more than happy to have a hand or two to hold when they reform.
  82. Lup and Barry are planning something on this empty world, and Luce isn’t sure what until Taako knocks it out on the wall between their rooms. She doesn’t wait until he is done talking to move into his room and hug him. She isn’t sure when they became this close, but as he cries into her shoulder to relieve some anxiety, she doesn’t really care.
  83. Lup and Barry are a little more reckless now that ‘dying doesn’t count’ and it scares Magnus terribly until Barry actually dies. Magnus doesn’t speak to him for a week because they forgot to tell him that they were semi-immortal.
  84. Barry almost starves when he forgets he is alive again and forgets he actually has to eat now. Taako vows to never let him forget it and Barry promptly tries to feed the information to Fisher. Neither of them is allowed near the poor thing anymore.
  85. Magnus spends more time carving various toys for Fisher than practicing his fighting skills, and in a world this magical it doesn’t really matter. If Lucretia wasn’t a multi-class Warlock and Monk, she would have loved the break it gave her to let the magical beings do all the work. Instead, she threw herself into it.
  86. Lup and Barry take the transition to a less magical Plane worse than anyone else on the ship and Taako is smug about it for the first week. Then they realize that the plane’s magic is eating itself along with any magical beings in it and his attitude changes really quickly.
  87. There isn’t a sun with which to measure day and night on this planet so the team falls back to measuring heartbeats. It isn’t what the locals use, and it isn’t something they have thought about in a long time, but there is something comforting about the way their heartbeats all manage to sync up in one way or another.
  88. There is nothing as jarring after a world of darkness as a world of perpetual light. Barry is inspired by this and does a _lot_ of experiments. Lucretia just pretends she doesn’t have a perpetual migraine and does her best to uphold her side of her and Taako’s deal.
  89. They are the edge of a breakthrough with the hunger, they can feel it. Barry and Lup are restless and his is the third year in a row that Barry has died in the lab because he forgot to take care of himself. Lucretia thinks that if she can just understand this last piece of the puzzle, if she can just figure this out…. She won't for a long time.
  90. Lucretia has to pause her planning when Taako does 12 minutes into the cycle the same way she died in cycle 10. She loses thirty gold to Mags when they realize it took him 80 years more than her to die for a pretty face.
  91. When Taako comes back they all tease Lucretia about cycle 10 again. They say it's because she did it first but she thinks it is because it was easier back then. No one thinks Davenport does stunts on purpose anymore. 
  92. This year is peaceful, a blessing and a curse as Lucretia learns to create more than she already knew. She used to love the quiet but now, she wishes she had something to stop her mind from wandering back to her past. 
  93. Now that they have a plan to stop their endless fantasy groundhog year, they are more desperate to find the light than ever before. Despite her protest to the plan itself, _home_ sounds like something she would love. 
  94. When they don't find the light this time Taako pretends it doesn't bother him. There are six people in the entire world who it doesn't fool. 
  95. They get the light in time to enact their plan on this plane, but half of them die doing it. They don't want to leave this world behind, but no one can figure out the notes Barry left on splitting the light before they are found. Barry blames himself when he shows up a month later as a litch with a Half-dead reaper in tow even though no one else does. 
  96. They don't even see the light fall this year, so instead they work on their relic designs. This devolves into a ‘who can pick the worst piece of trash’ contest that Lucretia wins with a ripped fantasy pool noodle she found stuffed in a corner of the ship they hadn't used in over 50 years. 
  97. As soon as Merle knows that this isn't their last year, he looks Lucretia in the eyes and asks her to kill him. _I have died 67 times, Lucretia. If I die one more time before we find our home, then one time there,_ Lucretia is pretty sure his count is wrong, but Merle dies protecting the ship that year anyway.
  98. There is a buzzing in her veins when they rescue the light just a bit too late and she promises herself _next year_ as the crew settles in for whatever this plane holds. She doesn't know why, but part of her feels like next year will be it. 
  99. They do it. They did it. And now? 



 

An old woman has written seven-hundred lives and now

_ Just a little while  _ she tells herself as she copies seven-hundred more

She was 19 for a long time and a long time ago but now

Now she is ageless and she is alone.


End file.
